March 10, 2006

Revellers taking part in the Basant festival, which marks the start of the spring in Punjab, spend millions of rupees on day-and-night kite battles and the skies are filled with the brightly coloured toys.

Many people use strings coated with a paste containing glass powder or with iron wool to sever the strings of rival kites. But the cords have also claimed the lives of 10 people, most of them children, police and newspapers said.

Most are killed when the strings fall across roads at head height and slit the throats of people on motorbikes.

When I read The Kite Runner (HIGHLY recommended, BTW, with a view of the Taliban in Afghanistan), I learned that "kite-dueling" seems to be a long-running tradition among people in the region, and seemed very celebrated within the community.

You've got to hand it to people in the Muslim world for finding really dangerous ways to celebrate. This reminds me of the long-standing problem in Iraq -- people celebrate by firing guns in the air. Unfortunately, if a lot of people in an urban area shoot straight up, gravity does eventually cause these bullets to come back down at nearly equal speed. So people just get shot randomly out of the sky from time to time.

I am just impressed that people keep flying the battle kites after people keep dying from it. That's pretty messed up.

But yes, battle kites is a pleasing image...I imagine kites with all sort of sharp protuberances, gleaming in the sun, with war paint on them.

We do it in India as well. It's a helluva a lot of fun. The string itself isn't very dangerous, unless it's still attached to the kite. You could cut open a finger (as with a kitchen knife chopping veggies) on them but the deaths are from running into the strings when they are still attached to the kites.

There is another danger to it though. The dueling is best done from roofs and after cutting a rival kite it's imperative to retrieve it. My uncle, as a child, fell off a roof three stories. He's got a nice dent in the side of his head from it. :)

A relative of mine was killed in NJ many years ago when someone strung up piano wire across a field in an attempt to stop people from riding motorbikes in the area. But although I've read accounts of kite flying in India (people jumping from roof to roof) I never heard about dangerous kite string!

Kite wars was also the sport in Santiago, Chile when I lived there. As I recall, September was the month for kite flying.

It was incredibly entertaining to watch - something like a National Geographic special on lions. The kite flyers would be miles apart, but could be seen stalking one another in the air. People would stop whatever they were doing to watch and see who won by cutting the others string first.

Cut strings coming down and killing people sounds a little odd, but I could see the danger. It was not uncommon to see the string being wrapped between two trees or poles in a yard so the glue with glass could be applied and allowed to dry.